At the Mall With Children: Group Size and Pedestrian Economy of Movement

Abstract

The study of pedestrian locomotion in public environments includes both velocity and trajectory of movement. Within public settings such as shopping malls, pedestrians display economy of movement by minimizing the distance (trajectory) walked to arrive at a destination (Bitgood & Dukes, 2006). Although groups of pedestrians have been found to walk more slowly than individuals (Finnis & Walton, 2008), there has been little systematic investigation of how the size of a group and the presence of accompanying children independently affect pedestrian trajectory and velocity. Five naturalistic observational studies with 1,050 observations were conducted at an enclosed retail shopping mall. Neither the size of groups nor the number of children had a significant effect on trajectory of movement. However, both group size and number of children independently predicted pedestrian velocity. Results have implications for predictions of pedestrian facility throughput.

Video Analysis of Pedestrian Movement (VAPM) under Different Lighting Conditions—Method Exploration

“…There was, however, no relationship between walking speed and positioning on the pavement. Another study found that the presence of other people affects walking speed but not the trajectory of movement [47]; however, this study did not examine differences between light and dark environmental conditions and did not address the role of artificial lighting.…”

Deviation of Pedestrian Path due to the Presence of Building Entrances

“…ey found that gender, age, physique, goal orientation, presence of children, baggage, shoe-type, and looking around behaviour significantly correlated with walking speed. Other works established the impact of culture [12][13][14] and group composition [15][16][17][18].…”

The difference between individuals and social groups in multidirectional movement

“…1 shows the sketch of the experiment scenario and a snapshot of the experiment (the red pedestrians represent the individuals and the blue pedestrians represent the social groups). In this paper, we only consider pairs as social group since the proportion of pair is larger than 50% of crowd in most case [1][2][3][4]. In this paper, a special relationship that is the strong paired relationship between pairs was adopted.…”

“…The comprehensive understanding on pedestrian dynamics is essential for crowd management and facility design. The major component of the crowd is social groups [1][2][3][4]. However, most of previous studies focused on individuals but only a few works consider the influence of social groups in a crowd on pedestrian dynamics.…”